Naguib Mahfouz – the Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Egypt – was born 100 years ago, on December 11, 1911, into a large and cheerful family in Gamaliya, the tumultuous quarter of Cairo where so many of his books were set. And there were, indeed, a lot of books – more than 30 novels and numerous volumes of stories (he wrote about 350). His own wry, concise and moving meditations appear in Echoes of An Autobiography (1994), one of my favorite books, which opens with a meditation on the idea of revolution in Egypt. The passage ends with Mahfouz, a boy of seven, being turned away from school because of the revolution, which had temporarily closed its doors: "From the depths of my heart I prayed to God that the revolution might last forever."

He was always, I think, a revolutionist in his own way: one who resisted while, at the same time, loving Egyptian ways, so affectionately rendered in his vast fiction. His chief claim to fame, at least in the west, is probably the sumptuous Cairo Trilogy of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. These books follow the life and times of an Egyptian patriarch over three decades, beginning with the revolt against British occupation in 1919 – a turning point in Egyptian history that inspired Mahfouz, who was an ardent nationalist – and extends to the end of the second world war. It's a rich and engaging work, offering a detailed realistic portrait of Cairo that drew comparisons with European masters such as Balzac, Tolstoy, and Dickens.

"I read a lot of European novels when I was a young man," Mahfouz told me, nearly a decade ago, when I met him at an old café in Cairo. "And I've continued to read them. A writer must read." We spent an evening together, surrounded by a group of his old friends, who often met up with him for talk and strong coffee. "Dickens, of course, was especially important for me," he said. "The world breaks before you in his books, its light and darkness. Everything is there."

He was a tiny man with immense energy and a quick smile, despite the fact that in 1994 he had been attacked by a young Islamic fundamentalist who disapproved of his largely secular work. The attacker managed to sever a nerve that left his writing hand withered, thus complicating his last years, but he somehow continued to write.

Writing obsessed him from a young age. He married late, in his mid-40s, preferring to devote his energies to his writing, though he also worked as a civil servant for many decades, retiring in 1972 from a position in the ministry of culture. "I was always happiest at my writing desk," he said to me, explaining that he wrote in the morning, ate in the afternoon, and spent the evenings with friends in a café.

While the Cairo Trilogy attracted a wide readership outside the Arab world, leading to his Nobel prize in 1988, a good deal of his work has never been translated into English. Mahfouz is more complicated and various a writer than most non-Arabic readers know, his work ranging from social realism to fabulous storytelling in the vein of the Arabian Nights: see, for instance, his Children of Gebelaawi – a wildly inventive piece of fiction that came out in 1959 and forms a kind of riff on Islamic and biblical history.

A fair portion of the meditations in Echoes of an Autobiography consists of conversations with a mythical seer, Sheikh Abd-Rabbith al-Ta'ith. In one of these, the interlocutor asks the wise fellow about the afterlife, and he replies: "If you have sincerely loved the world, the Afterlife will love you warmly." From what I know of his books, Mahfouz loved the world with a depth rarely seen, and I have no doubt he now rests happily, over the rainbow.